1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless communications, and more specifically to a method and apparatus for providing optimal allocation of resources in a wireless communication system.
2. Related Art
A wireless communication system may be viewed as containing a wireless network which connects various mobile devices (or, in general, any terminal device). Mobile network represents an example wireless network providing wireless communication between mobile devices. In general, mobile networks contain systems such as base stations which communicate over air with individual mobile devices.
Wireless networks generally operate over an allocated frequency spectrum. The allocated frequency spectrum is divided into a number of sub carriers used for transferring information of interest. In general, a sender (base station or mobile station, depending on the direction) transfers the information to a receiver on one or more of the allocated sub carriers. OFDMA represents a technology which operates according to such an approach, and a base station often allocates the sub carriers to the individual mobile stations (for sending or receiving, in general transferring).
In general, time is logically divided into a number of slots (“time slots”), and a sub carrier may be allocated for a transfer in each time slot. Accordingly, it may be appreciated that the quality of services (QoS) provided to applications depend on respective number of sub carriers allocated in the corresponding time slots. Accordingly, the sub carriers and the time slots may be viewed as resources.
The allocation of resources is of particular importance when multi-media applications are supported in the mobile network and in mobile stations, since different applications require different QoS (hereafter “required QoS”). For example, delay sensitive applications such as VoIP, video conferencing have QoS specifications in terms of delay bound, delay jitter and throughout. Applications such as web browsing (over TCP) have QoS specifications in terms of their average delay and throughout. On the other hand, file transfer (e.g. FTP) applications have QOS specifications in terms of throughout. The QoS requirements can be either qualitative (high/low data throughput) or quantitative (CBR of 128 Kbps), can be user specified or understood from the nature/type of the application.
Accordingly, there is a general need for optimal allocation of sub carriers to devices supporting multimedia application in a wireless communication system or providing different QOS to different applications.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.